10.5 Pragmatics and the Cooperative Principle
Bronwyn Bjorkman
In talking about the meaning of phrases and sentences, so far we’ve focused on the literal meaning of words and morphemes—their denotations—and how those literal meanings compose with one another in predictable ways. The study of these types of meaning is the domain of semantics. But there are other aspects of meaning that can’t be studied or understood in these terms, things we communicate not with the literal meanings of our words and how they’re arranged, but instead by the way we choose to say them, or the social context of our communication. These types of meanings are the domain of pragmatics, the study of meaning in its social or communicative context.
Probably all of us have had the experience of having our words misinterpreted, or taken “out of context”. This often happens even if someone definitely understood our literal words — they may simply have misread our intentions or goals. This type of misunderstanding is precisely the kind of thing we might investigate in pragmatics — both what we intend to communicate, and how someone else might interpret our communications.
In this unit we focus on one particular type of pragmatic reasoning, the the calculation of conversational implicatures on the basis of what are known as Gricean Maxims—these maxims were proposed by the philosopher H.P. Grice in a (1975) paper that proposed that in conversation we adopt a Cooperative Principle when interpreting what people say.
Terminology: Entailment, Presupposition, and Implicature
Before discussing the Cooperative Principle and the individual maxims, let’s introduce some terminology that will help us talk about the logical relationships between sentences—the different ways in which we can draw conclusions.
Consider the following pair of sentences:
- Jennice and Alice have both read War and Peace.
- Jennice has read War and Peace.
If the first of these sentences is true, the second one also has to be true! Put another way, if the second sentence is false, then the first sentence is also definitely false. This is the relationship of entailment.
- Entailment
- For two propositions (i.e. things that can be true or false) P and Q, P entails Q if whenever P is true, Q must also be true.
Entailment is technically a semantic relationship rather than a pragmatic one, but it’s useful to have it in mind to contrast two other relationships with: presupposition and implicature.
Consider next the following two sentences:
- Nadim’s brother is visiting.
- Nadim has a brother.
This might seem to be another case of entailment, but it works a little bit differently. If the first sentence is true, the second one also has to be true. But if the second one is false—if Nadim doesn’t have a brother—then it’s not just that the first sentence is false, it seems like we can’t even really interpret the first sentence. Here we say that the first sentence presupposes the second one.
Here’s another pair of sentences wher